Cricket is no longer reserving 5G for its priciest service tier. As of today, 5G is enabled for all of the prepaid carrier's plans. As you might guess, the provider is also doing away with the modest 8Mbps cap on most of its plans. You can pay as little as $30 per month (for one line) for 5G, to put it another way — important if you're more interested in raw speed than anything else.

There are some caveats. Cricket isn't changing data caps for its two lowest-priced plans, so you could burn through the modest 2GB or 10GB allotments that much sooner. You also don't have many choices for 5G phones if you buy directly from Cricket, including the iPhone 13 range as well as a handful of low-end Motorola and Samsung models. You'll still have a strong incentive to use the higher-end tiers, and you may want to bring your own phone.

It's no secret as to why AT&T is making Cricket more appealing, though. Cricket added 2 million customers (now 12.4 million total) in just the past two years. While AT&T's regular service clearly has more overall subscribers, Cricket is the hotter property in terms of relative growth. Adding 5G to more plans could keep that momentum alive. And simply speaking, Cricket needed to catch up. Rivals like Boost Mobile and T-Mobile's Metro already offer 5G across multiple tiers. Your choice of prepaid carriers may now boil down to specific plan features and network quality.

The game of cricket boggles most Americans in the same way our football perplexes the rest of the world. We won’t even pretend to understand what a “wicket” or an “over” is, but apparently it’s important enough to keep track of that so an English cricket club decided to build their own electronic scoreboard for their – pitch? Field? Help us out here.

This scoreboard build was undertaken by what team member [Ian] refers to as some “middle-aged blokes from Gloucestershire” with no previous electronics experience. That’s tough enough to deal with, but add to it virtually no budget, a huge physical size for the board, exposure to the elements, and a publicly visible project where failure would be embarrassingly obvious, and this was indeed an intimidating project to even consider. Yet despite the handicaps, they came up with a great rig, with a laser-cut acrylic cover for a professional look. A Raspberry Pi runs the LED segments and allows WiFi connections from a laptop or phone in the stands. They’ve even recently upgraded to solar power for the system.

And we’ll toot our own horn here, since this build was inspired at least in part by a Hackaday post. The builders have a long list of other links that inspired or instructed them, and we think that says something powerful about the hacker community that we’ve all been building – a group with no previous experience manages a major build with the guidance of seasoned hackers. That’s something to feel good about.